Posts Tagged 'blue cheese'

Now, at last, for a literary interlude, I must offer two passages from Irish modernist prose, both of which feature Gorgonzola as their creamy centers.

Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks — his first published prose fiction, if I remember right (1934) — is something like a collection of short stories centered on the character Belacqua. Burning toast to an indigestible blackness is part of the refined, almost scientific lunchtime routine for this obsessive and compulsive youth; after which he sets out for the rotten cheese to complement: Gorgonzola.

Now the great thing was to avoid being accosted. To be stopped at this stage and have conversational nuisance committed all over him would be a disaster. His whole being was straining forward towards the joy in store. If he were accosted now he might just as well fling his lunch into the gutter and walk straight back home. Sometimes his hunger, more of mind, I need scarcely say, than of body, for this meal amounted to such a frenzy that he would not have hesitated to strike any man rash enough to buttonhole and baulk him, he would have shouldered him out of his path without ceremony. Woe betide the meddler who crossed him when his mind was really set on his meal.

He threaded his way rapidly, his head bowed, through the familiar labyrinth of lanes and suddenly dived into a little family grocery. In the shop they were not surprised. Most days, about this hour, he shot in off the street in this way.

The slab of cheese was prepared. Separated since morning from the piece, it was only waiting for Belacqua to call and take it. Gorgonzola cheese. He knew a man who came from Gorgonzola, his name was Angelo. He had been born in Nice but all his youth had been spent in Gorgonzola. He knew where to look for it. Every day it was there, in the same corner, waiting to be called for. They were very decent obliging people.

He looked sceptically at the cut of cheese. He turned it over on its back to see was the other side any better. The other side was worse. They had laid it better side up, they had practised that little deception. Who shall blame them? He rubbed it. It was sweating. That was something. He stopped and smelt it. A faint fragrance of corruption. What good was that? He didn’t want fragrance, he wasn’t a bloody gourmet, he wanted a good stench. What he wanted was a good green stenching rotten lump of Gorgonzola cheese, alive, and by God he would have it.

He looked fiercely at the grocer.

‘What’s that?’ he demanded.

The grocer writhed.

‘Well?’ demanded Belacqua, he was without fear when roused, ‘is that the best you can do?’

‘In the length and breadth of Dublin,’ said the grocer, ‘you won’t find a rottener bit this minute.’

Belacqua was furious. The impudent dogsbody, for two pins he would assault him.

‘It won’t do,’ he cried, ‘do you hear me, it won’t do at all. I won’t have it.’ He ground his teeth.

The grocer, instead of simply washing his hands like Pilate, flung out his arms in a wild crucified gesture of supplication. Sullenly Belacqua undid his packet and slipped the cadaverous tablet of cheese between the hard cold black boards of the toast. He stumped to the door where he whirled round however.

‘You heard me?’ he cried.

‘Sir’ said the grocer. This was not a question, nor yet an expression of acquiescence. The tone in which it was let fall made it quite impossible to know what was in the man’s mind. It was a most ingenious riposte.

‘I tell you’ said Belacqua with great heat ‘this won’t do at all. If you can’t do better than this’ he raised the hand that held the packet ‘I shall be obliged to go for my cheese elsewhere. Do you mark me?’

‘Sir’ said the grocer.

And now, from Joyce’s Ulysses: Leopold Bloom considers lunch, while struggling to keep his mind off his wife’s approaching adultery. He’s troubled by the carnivorous gluttony of his fellow customers (“Eat or be eaten. Kill! Kill!”), and so shuns beef for the moment. Almost settles on a sardine — the last lonely sardine of summer — but then asks at last for a Gorgonzola sandwich. Some critics, the Bloomlovers, consider his decision a sensitive compromise between the thesis of bloody meat and the antithesis of flimsy vegetarianism: a synthesis in the form of an animal food that does not entail the death of the animal. Richard Ellmann, who wrote the fat Joyce biography you will find at your bookstore, thought a Gorgonzola sandwich was the best existential choice, “because cheese is neither vegetable nor meat: it is formed from mammal’s milk without slaughter, and enclosed in bread which is vegetable in origin but reconstructed by man.” And what does Bloom think?

Kosher. No meat and milk together. Hygiene that was what they call now. Yom Kippur fast spring cleaning of inside. Peace and war depend on some fellow’s digestion. Religions. Christmas turkeys and geese. Slaughter of innocents. Eat drink and be merry. Then casual wards full after. Heads bandaged. Cheese digests all but itself. Mitey cheese.

Not the most immediately decipherable passage — but very nice, I think, and potent. Later, Bloom’s stream of consciousness dwells on

Gorgonzola is another stracchino cheese, like Taleggio: it’s made from the milk of “tired” cows, coming down from the highs of their summer grazing in the Alps, on top of the world. (The curious may wish to read my post on Taleggio.) It used to be called “green stracchino,” generically, before it was named “Gorgonzola, “ after its alleged town-of-origin. At my home, we prefer to call it “the weeping green-eyed beast” — an epithet that bears no relation to the Green-Eyed Monster of Envy (that most deadly of deadly sins, “which doth mock the meat it feeds on,” according to Shakespeare, and makes you look like a leek left too long in the sun, according to William Langland).

In addition to the love-stricken swain tale (recited here), Gorgonzola boasts another origin-legend of folly, anxiety, and unexpected redemption. The story goes that a Gorgonzola-area innkeeper dealt in stracchino, before any stracchinos were green; and one day he discovered, to his horror, that much of his cheese stash had fallen ill with a greenish mold. After some deliberation the innkeeper decided — whether out of maudlin desperation or weasel-cunning — to push the green cheese on his customers. He called it a new food masterpiece, a culinary delicacy, a spectacle of local culture; he flourished all the old tricks of the confidence-man cheesemonger. His customers ate, unsuspecting, and they loved it. (They don’t always.) News of the new green cheese spread, and a regional wonder was born.

This would have been somewhere between the 9th and 11th centuries, probably. In the 1950s and 60s, low-quality imitators and foreign devils threatened the reputation of Gorgonzola — as well as the businesses of decent, traditional cheesemakers. So name-protection was granted in 1955 and a Consortium for the Protection of Gorgonzola Cheese was created in 1970. The cheese’s production is now restricted to Lombary and Piedmont; the method (a slightly unusual one) is now standardized, a little industrialized, as much as the Consortium decided it needed to be.

Visit the Consortium’s web page for more information on production — and also, more urgently, to see Italy’s new line-up of Gorgonzola Babes! A collage of photos, fading in and out over the title bar, consists of images you’d expect on the covers of romance novels and Cosmopolitan, images you might want to hide under your mattress. The marketing model for Gorgonzola seems to be “Glamor, Romance, and Cleavage.” Not an uncommon model . . . and no less apt for cheese than for watches and chewing gum, I suppose. Consider this ad I found, a mild example:

I prefer not to know what’s being said. I did find out, though, that “topolona” means “chick” in colloquial parlance, “big female mouse” more literally. “You beautiful big mother of rodents, you. You chubby, cheese-crazed mouse matron. Have some Gorgonzola, my pudgy, bucktoothed, primeval pest. And show me your mammaries — at least the tops, please. Or the sides.”

Gorgonzola can be bought young and sweet, dolce, or aged and piquant, piccante or naturale. I’ve had more experience with the dolce, and it’s a strikingly unique flavor: a lingering blue mold bite; a creamy white paste that melts like ice cream in your mouth; a honey-and-fruit sweetness that hits the higher tones on your palate. I haven’t had other blues much like it. (The closest I have had is a very fine and no less unique American rehashing called Oregonzola, made at Rogue River Creamery in Oregon.)

Coat of arms of the Comune di Gorgonzola. To explain the symbolism: There is a piece of green cheese on top of the tower, as in life. The lions are racing. Both lions love green cheese, like good and brave people should. The Monarch watches over, and approves.

Roquefort and Gorgonzola manifest the two strains of blue mold, Penicillium roqueforti and Penicillium glaucum, in their most traditional and famous forms. They may be the oldest blue cheeses, the prototypes; but they’re still around, eaten daily. Not dinosaurs. Perhaps they are to blue cheese what Plato and Aristotle are to philosophy (supposedly), or mice and weasels to mammals-in-general.

If we take these two as the primeval predecessors of all blue cheese — then where did they come from? How did humans (more specifically, the French and Italians) finally figure it out, the Great Blue Secret? The stories are surprisingly similar. Actually, according to prominent versions of these legends, they are surprisingly exactly the same:

The Great Blue Hole.

A young and amorous dairyman, with the stolidity of a lobotomized labrador, abandons his milk (or cheese) to chase tail, as they say — to slobber and gape at the local sirens. When he comes back, having carved his love-blather on a thousand trunks and who knows what else, the milk (or cheese) has changed, and so has his world: during the young man’s absence a Great Blue Secret was bestowed on his milk (or cheese). As fearless as he is lascivious, the youth does not throw out his altered meal, but nourishes it, even reproduces it. And so: Blue Cheese!

I’ll allow for a little more specificity — but not much:

Roquefort: In Rouergue, France, a shepherd enslaved to Cupid leaves his lunch of cheese and rye in a limestone Cave of Combalou, so that he may pursue the village beauties with two free hands for pawing. Days later he remembers that cheese in the cave — maybe he repented of his carnal concupiscence and his faculties were restored, miraculously, or he realized that cheese was all along a better friend to him than hussies, always so self-sacrificing . . . Either way, the shepherd curses his birth and returns, only to find a strange blue growth on his cheese nugget, a colony extended from the moldy bread. He eats the cheese anyway, out of curiosity (or hoping it’s poison and he’ll expire at last, proving the depth of his romantic spirit); his tongue touches blue and he has an epiphany; Roquefort is born.

(Rye bread encourages the growth of the blue mold natural to those Caves of Combalou. It was used later — stale, moldy rye, I mean — to cultivate P. roqueforti for the soon-famous local cheese.)

The Great Blue Turaco: The Largest Turaco.

Gorgonzola: In the foothills of northern Italy, in or near the town of Gorgonzola, a similarly distracted cheesemaker ditches his evening batch to rendezvous with a lover. (They pass a horrible night, all awkward missteps leading to bickering, silence and hurrumphs. Thank heaven for sunrise. As the swain returns to his cheese, he vows never to love again. That’s how I like to imagine it.) At dawn, hoping to conceal his negligence, the penitent dairyman ladles new morning curd atop the old, ripe evening milk — which has accumulated strange blue patches. He goes through with the cheesemaking process, despite the blue, and is later delighted to discover that he prefers this new, tainted concoction to whatever he was making before.

Moral: Bitter love makes better cheese.

Ugh.

(Mixing evening and morning milk is one key aspect of traditional Gorgonzola production. Along with cursing your cativa lover.)

Every better future that one wishes for mankind is also necessarily a worse future in some respects, for it is fanatical to believe that a new, higher stage of mankind would unite all the merits of earlier stages and would, for example, also have to produce the highest form of art [cheese]. Rather, each season has its own merits and charms, and excludes those of the other seasons.

I’ve never seen stilton covered in mites… And I have certainly never been blessed with visions of Christ as a result of eating cheese. Maybe the good cheeses were fewer and farther between, but was the best Old World stilton leaps and bounds ahead of today’s best? Have we sacrificed punctuated quality for consistent mediocrity? You focus on the low-end of cheeses, but what about the high? Was Mary tripping on mold or blissed out on a small slice of heaven?

And what kind of cheese am I actually eating in my blue cheese dressing?

1. It’s not unusual that you haven’t seen any Stilton covered in mites. Few sheltered contemporaries have. Times are tougher for cheese mites — one of the ecological cruelties of the modern age. But I’ve read in the weeklies they are banding together in unions and demanding the right to return to public view, without shame. They wear red scarves around their bug-waists to signal solidarity. Until their cry is heard (which will require the most sensitive ears), you can see cheese mites on Stilton in the first nature documentary of all time!, called “Cheese Mites” (1903). (I have to link to BBC because I can’t figure out how to embed this one, if it’s even possible.)

(There is no narration, because there was no David Attenborough, and without Attenborough there’s just no point.)

And if you haven’t seen God yet — believe me, you’re the last — here He is, too:

God appears for your personal vision.

2. In “Curse Cheese, and Die” I wasn’t suggesting that Old World cheese was bad in the Old Days, just that some people had problems with it — found it “extremely lowly, offensive and excremental” (Lotichius), or considered it a symbol of death and decay (the original Yorick’s Skull). I don’t know how it tasted. Some people did like it, I think; and whatever cranky writers griped about, people kept on making cheese, undaunted. Was the best Old World Stilton better than ours? (Remember Sebastian the Crab’s pièce de résistance — “The seaweed is always greener …”) Probably in some ways, not so in others. And insofar as artisanal cheesemakers try to blend the virtues of the old (like raw milk, smaller batches, and handmade care) with the new (like improvements in technology, consistency, and control), there’s a good chance that we’re now able to eat the best cheese of all time. And wouldn’t that be gratifying.

For the curious, there’s a cheese sold now called Stichelton that may be closer to the Stilton-original that Defoe found crusted with mites at the Bell Inn, since it’s handmade with raw instead of pasteurized milk. It’s called Stichelton because English law dictates, after a hasty 1996 decision, that name-protected “Stilton” must come from pasteurized milk. If you eat it, you will enjoy it, you may swoon or speak in tongues, but you will not be able to pay your bills and will be reduced in your old age to collecting recyclables.

3. Finally: What kind of cheese is blue cheese?

Blue cheese is blue because it is infested with blue bacteria. There’s no curse upon it, at least none of consequence. The most famous of these tiny beasts is Penicillium roqueforti, originally used to make Roquefort, the most famous French blue; now used to make most all blue cheeses. The other popular strain is Penicillium glaucum, which is found in the milk-jungles of Gorgonzola. These molds began their world-conquests from isolated caves in France and Italy: local aberrations uncovered by chance or Providence, captured and enslaved for the service of humanity. (They probably don’t miss their cave homes terribly: everybody was so quiet, slow, and blind.) These molds viciously defend their terrain, fending off less cheese-worthy breeds of bacteria — the kinds that rot cheese and people alike. And the reason blue cheeses are streaked or blotchy is that the blue molds thrive with exposure to air; so at some point in the maturing process a cheesemaker will pierce the fledging blue with a long needle, providing the mold with tracks of open air to crowd and congest with its piquant flesh. (Some blues are crumbly and porous enough that piercing isn’t necessary.)

I’ve already spoiled the “short” part of the “frequent and short entries” ambition, so I’m abandoning the path here. I’ll try to adjust.

In the universe of glossy cheese books, gourmet food shops, and “foodie” media, there’s plenty said and written against the industrial cheese complex that mass-produces rubbery mozzarella and rindless cheddar. It’s more rare that these critics acknowledge some of the indisputably positive influences our factories and our sciences have made on cheese production. I’ve suggested already that pasteurization, acidimeters, and standardized rennet extracts — to name a few examples — bolstered the cheesemaker’s reliability. An even earlier breakthrough was in 1669, when Johann Joachim Becher first distinguished between the processes of putrefaction and fermentation. They hadn’t figured that one out yet. As you might imagine, then, the likelihood was not insignificant before the 18th century that your cheese was dangerously foul, not delightfully pungent or “just overripe.” So I think the revulsion that some of our predecessors felt for pre-modern cheese deserves mention.

NASTY CHEESE AND THE POWERS OF DARKNESS

The Devil's Cheesewring, a strange rock formation in Cornwall, and timeless symbol of England's past mistrust of cheese.

In much literature of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance (not all, and varying by country), cheese-in-general was considered an indigestible, unendurable, and generally abominable poison. Also, the unusual, mysterious processes of coagulation and fermentation gave cheesemaking a sort of sorcery-stigma in some areas. Perhaps there are early sources for this. I’ve found one: In his discussion of “What We Should Believe Concerning the Transformations Which Seem to Happen to Men Through the Art of Demons,” St. Augustine mentions an old Italian legend that certain wicked landladies enchanted their cheese, so that any traveler who ate it, expecting hospitality, would be transformed temporarily into a beast of burden, and forced into burdensome, beastly labor. This is hardly a threat today, but one can never be too safe, especially at Halloween-time. Never accept unwrapped cheese from strangers.

(I wonder if that whole legend isn’t a classist stab at the poor, who often ate cheese out of necessity and, surprise, labored. But I’m saving cheese class-issues for another post.)

On the indigestibility of cheese, there’s an old Suffolk ditty (very awkward, I’ll admit):

Those that made me were uncivil
They made me harder than the devil.
Knives won’t cut me, fire won’t sweat me,
Dogs bark at me, but can’t eat me.

Apparently, some people not only disliked and rejected cheese, but vehemently cursed it — even when it was popularly eaten and nutritionally necessary, not to mention economically indispensable (as in Holland, one of the most prominent early exporters of cheese). I could quote Shakespeare, but that would be tedious. In 1643, Johannes Petrus Lotichius wrote a treatise, De Casei Nequitia (On the Vileness of Cheese), that may epitomize this antagonism: he blames cheese for thousands of diseases, and pronounces color to be the only difference between cheese and common feces. He certainly didn’t receive many dinner invitations, talking like that. Lotichius may have been out of line; but even more moderate physicians tended to consider cheese unhealthy, negatively affecting the bodily humors and even the mind.

Combine cheese’s alleged invulnerability to fire, magical metamorphoses, general vileness, pestilential powers, and deleterious effects on the divine human mind, and you have a full-fledged, frighteningly potent Enemy of God.

A Mexican nun named Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (born Juana Ramirez de Asbaje, 1648-1695) loved the taste of cheese from her early childhood. Some are born tempted, but none are born sinners. Knowing, as it was known at the time, that cheese degraded the mind, poisoned reason, hindered learning, Sor Juana Inés in devotion to God gave up the beloved food forever. Like many monastics, she considered the pursuit of learning vital to her vocation on earth, in this life; therefore, although cheese might be delicious, that pleasure would only ensnare her in the World and stunt her spiritual growth, by making her stupider.

It was very brave of Sor Juana to give up cheese, and we are all very proud of her.

THE PASSION OF MARGARET MARY ALOCOQUE

Quick everybody! Jesus is hurt!

Another nun of the same generation, on another continent, encountered the opposite test of faith. Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690, French) is known by now for her vision of the Sacred Heart of Christ: the image of Jesus’ heart stuck with a crown of thorns. In these latter days, we can witness that vision on innumerable scented candles and tattooed bodies in any urban area — to everyone’s spiritual benefit — but in those times of horse-drawn wagons, a lady had to endure intense ascetic penance, prompting a once-in-a-lifetime mystical ecstasy, just to catch a moment’s glimpse. (Margaret Mary was not the first to bear witness to the thorn-crowned heart: the cult has roots in early Christianity. But she certainly served as instigator and icon for the modern movement, which was at first considered heretical, then approved, then became mainstream only after the 18th century.)

In tension with the trends of globalization and specialization that define our era, some people are adopting low-tech and do-it-yourself approaches to many of the problems that factories and alienated laborers have already “solved” for us. It’s a cottage industry of its own: How to do everything yourself (while keeping your continued reliance on the infrastructure of modern industry in the background, if that happens to hamper your moral pride). You can bake your own bread, make your own cheese, tune-up your own bicycle, sew your own clothes — can you have your own vision of the Sacred Heart of Christ? How did Margaret Mary do it? And how can we do it ourselves?

It may be impossible for all but God to define the causality involved in any Vision of God; but we do know that Margaret Mary sought hers through old fashioned spiritual trials. And we do know that one of her greatest spiritual trials was, believe it, the eating of cheese. Unlike Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Margaret Mary Alacoque loathed cheese with violent passion. (Maybe at the time they were making better cheese in Mexico than in France?) Her whole family loathed cheese. This hatred brought them together, no doubt; even when Mommy got grumpy or Daddy didn’t feel like talking, at least they could agree that cheese was disgusting. When Margaret Mary entered the nunnery, her brother insisted that her religious contract include a stipulation protecting her against unwilling consumption of cheese.

Margaret Mary Alacoque (looking her most contrite): “I will pledge my life to you, O Lord, to be thy humble wife and servant for the remainder of my days. But only if you keep your stinky French cheeses away from me.”

(God bunches his eyebrows, confused.)

Whether it was sorority-style hazing or genuine spiritual guidance, Margaret Mary’s superior did ask the young nun to eat cheese. It had to happen. A three day struggle internal ensued. What to do? With the eyes of God and all the holy choirs of angels, saints, unbaptized infants, and patriarchs on her, what could Margaret Mary do? Catherine of Siena drank down a bowl of pus to demonstrate her piety. Could Margaret Mary eat cheese?

After those three days of spiritual trial — her own temptation in the desert — Margaret Mary prayed for three or four hours, pleading for strength — her own Gethsemane.

(“Eat the cheese.” should become a new motivational motto. Child (perched on high-dive, crying): “I can’t do it mom! I’m really scared! I think I’m gonna get hurt!” Mother (on the deck, irritated, drinking from a hidden flask): “Oh shut up and eat the cheese!”)

The trial was as horrible as Margaret Mary imagined it would be, or so she claimed. Nevertheless — no: As a result, the future saint continued to eat cheese every day for eight years, in order to practice the Christian art of unconditional love. Epicurus be damned. (Jesus slaps his forehead and groans. God sighs.) Through these long years of suffering, Margaret Mary developed, in her own words, an “insatiable hunger for humiliations and mortifications, even though my natural sensitivity suffers from them intensely.” Still, there was a payoff — besides, in my mind, the daily cheese. Because of all the “pain,” her visions and ecstasies — the Lord’s graces, they were called — magnified and proliferated. Maybe we wouldn’t have our modern Cult of the Sacred Heart if Margaret Mary Alacoque hadn’t pulled up her socks, quit whining, and eaten the cheese.

And maybe you too can witness the Sacred Heart, if only you eat the cheese you loathe most.

THE BELL INN BRINGS DEATH TO THE DINNER TABLE

Daniel Defoe came for the Stilton, stayed for the cheese mites.

I have one more anecdote about disgusting premodern cheese that I’d like to share; and I’ll wriggle in a little history of a specific cheese.

Stilton (whose “home” is here) is one of the triumvirate of famous European blues, along with Roquefort and Gorgonzola. It’s much more modern than the others, however, first referred to as late as 1722 in William Stukeley’s Itinerarium Curiosum. From there the record is twisted by legends and, probably, competitive lies. So here’s just one version of it. (I probably should have consulted this History of Stilton Cheese before I wrote; but a library can only give so much, and man is finite.)

Lady Beaumont of Quenby Hall, in the English Midlands, wrote down her housekeeper’s recipe for a uniquely stunning blue-veined cheese; and the cheese was a hit, soon marketed as Quenby Cheese, or Beaumont’s Cheese, to nearby towns like Stamford and Leicester. (If I didn’t have to go to work tomorrow, I’d find a map and look up the English geography.) This housekeeper, Elizabeth Scarbrow, had a daughter, Francis Pullet; and this Pullet worked at an inn owned by her kinsman, Cooper Thornhill; and Thornhill’s inn was called the Bell Inn; and the Bell Inn was in Stilton, where Pullet made a name for her mother’s blue cheese. There’s the connection, hence the name. The inn resided along the Great North Road and so had no trouble attracting business and making its signature cheese famous.

In 1772, the author Daniel Defoe stopped at the inn and wrote of the renowned wonder, the King of English Cheeses:

it is called our English Parmesan and brought to the table with mites so thick around it they bring a spoon for you to eat the mites with, as you do the cheese.

If that’s not revolting, nothing is.

Some of you may have heard of a tradition in which port is poured over Stilton. Some of you may think this is Fine Dining in Old World Style. It is not — though it is Old World. The English used to pour port over Stilton in order to kill the mites and maggots that infested every wheel. Whether those English scraped those dead mites away or ate them with Defoe’s mite-spoon, I can’t say.

Next time you try Stilton, think of that. Think of maggots and rot; think of your cheese as a corpse. Next time you try Stilton, think of death.

(And this is my first attempt to explicate the cryptic proverb, “Cheese consumes all but itself.” There will be more.)